


Loverman

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Western, Blasphemy, Cannibalism, Come Marking, Deepthroating, Dreams, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Murder, Outlaws, Porn With Plot, Sex Addiction, Size Kink, Underage Sex, Unsafe Sex, psychopathy, sweat kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-04-08 07:22:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14100294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Western AU.At midnight when the police arrivedThe two had run into the westernMoon-down and the bodies stayed inThe house, reddening the dirty floor.And the criminals kissed with theMissing organs in their mouths,"Ha-ha-ha, at night the desert's ripeWith diabolical things."Will is fifteen. Hannibal likes none of God's children. Good thing Will belongs to the Devil.





	1. Loverman

LOVERMAN  
New Mexico, 1985

            On the television, behind the eddies of altered transmission, a reporter tells us that the cannibal has escaped. Somewhere in the armpit of the southwest, in a barren town of less than two-hundred, a young Will Graham watches the Ripper’s old court footage on a rotting television. The screen blips intermittently with cigarette burns and shivering lines. Now, a headline at the bottom of the screen announces Hannibal Lecter’s break-out from a Texan penitentiary. The colors of the screen cut through the dark of the room and play acid-yellow on Will’s sun-kissed, sunken face.

            A state-wide search is being conducted and a fourteen-year-old Will has strange dreams that night. Strange dreams about this man who’s occupied so much of his free time. Intangibly, of course. They’ve never met. But once he’d heard word from frightened old women of the cannibal and killings that were overtaking the state over, he had become obsessed. Newspaper clippings were collected in a drawer along with his lighters and his bullets and his buttons. Police files were sucked out of those willing to give him any information. The tabloids were collected, the TV interviews recorded on his VHS tapes.

            This isn’t the first dream, but it’s one that forces him awake.

            In the dark of the early morning, where the sun has barely made its grey ascent over the desert horizon, Will recollects the dream-image of the cannibal hoarding him close, in some public school closet. Among cleaning supplies and mops, Hannibal presses his palm to the glass of the door and crowds him into his space. Dwarfed by the criminal’s broad shoulders, Will buries his face under his arm and inhales the smell of blood and chlorine: antiseptic smells. Hannibal presses his crotch to Will’s stomach and the sky outside is a strange green, so bright and fake it might feature on Nickelodeon.

            The cloistering scent of blood seems stained inside Will’s nose all day. He can’t focus at school, his ragged, linen shirt wet with sweat as his heart races. He’s had too much coffee and the dream of Hannibal, this non-entity that has been so intangible, so incapable of touching in his mind, is now free. He can’t think of anything besides the fact that he is now forever lost. Will will never be able to visit him in prison when he gets older, like he was planning. Will can only dream of him. The steady stream of reports, the clever repartee between Hannibal and interviewers will cease to exist. This phosphor dot wraith of his television set, the printed words that amused him so much, this fake friend of his, will vanish into Will’s imagination. Only his art, the trail of blood that he knows the cannibal will inevitably leave behind him, will remain. It won’t be enough. Will can thoroughly seek out his nature through the forensic evidence he forces himself to obtain, but the character, the charm, the dripping sexuality of his (embarrassingly enough) idol, is gone.

            When Will goes home, he grabs a tacky gold necklace with a crucifix and fastens it beneath his bandanna and prays to some God that Hannibal comes west.

*

            At the pulpit, Will kneels. Sunday evening and he clasps his hands together and prays for a cannibal in a church. A cannibal to come to him and fuck him, to kill with him, to soak him in blood. His heart races and he feels the churning, unending upset stomach that’s brought on by his stolen obsession. Having Asperger’s usually incites a hyper-fixation, and while he’d never deem himself a hybristophiliac—he doesn’t even know what the word means—he’s definitely a sucker for this one and only killer.

            Some people get boy bands or _Star Trek_ or airplane models. Not cannibalistic serial killers that have the suave appearance of something so foreign and far-away that it is unclear as to where he’s even from. Some people cite Sweden, or Poland. But he read in a very obscure, long-forgotten interview that it was Lithuania, a country that Will has since dedicated extensive research to.

            Will isn’t yet that intelligent. Stubborn, fixated, obsessive, astute. But he isn’t a genius, not yet. He’s only fourteen and his empathy has yet to be harvested in full. He is not as egocentric as his peers but he has his own agenda.

            When he unfolds from the pulpit, he stands up and sits on a pew in a show of fake, dedicated meditation. He isn’t a Christian, but in the southern world of the 20th century, this goes unseen too often. His atheism being discovered is the least of his concerns.

            Can you even define yourself as a homosexual when you’ve only ever been interested in one person?

            He closes his eyes and gathers the reverie of another dream. These unconscious thoughts are all he has. They’ve become something of a linear narrative. Another life in sleep, affirmed in consciousness by the newspapers.

            In this dream, they are sweaty from a long day in the sun. They’re somewhere in Italy or in France, one of those pretty countries that Will watches on TV. There are ruins and stray cats and there’s an ocean lapping at marble, and the sun shines soft and glowing, not hot and beaming like in the hell of New Mexico. But they’re sweaty nonetheless, and exhausted. Day at the beach exhausted, where your skin stings with trapped light and your hair is tousled with the smell of ocean wind.

            The cowboy killer laid Will down on the ground and pushed his legs back. He unbuttoned a pair of corduroy pants which pressed into the back of Will’s tan thighs as he slid his huge, pulsing cock into him, and it didn’t hurt. It was warm and full and Will clenched around him, smiling serenely and relaxed as he was fucked, as if having a pleasant massage rather than a thorough fucking. His own cock, small but hard, bounced in time with the thrusts as his toes curled, rested on Hannibal’s shoulders. Hannibal’s face was blurred and abstract, and the sex was wet and noisy, slapping and sighing and huffs emanating from Will mostly. He held his own cock and jerked it off and Hannibal, a praising killer, leaned down and collected the pre-cum and seeped like honey dew from the tip of his pink-headed cock. Will clenched and whispered over and over, “Breed me, breed me,” like some girl or some animal. A completely heady thing, that made no sense. He couldn’t get pregnant but this animalistic nature overtook him and in the dream, he could feel it when Hannibal shot him full of cum, let it seep out, an unrealistic amount of it that seared his hole. Will drooled with his hand shoved in his mouth, eyes blurring, making Hannibal’s shape even less coherent. Hannibal collected the seed that came out of his puffy hole and put it to Will’s valentine-heart lips and said, “lick it all fuckin’ up,” in a strangely American accent. So Will did, for his cowboy killer, his human gator lover, his fucking sinnerman. And eating a piece of Hannibal like he did made him feel like a cannibal himself.

            That night, when Will woke up, hard and feverish like a madman, he found his corduroy jacket was pressed too hot to the back of his thighs. He had fallen asleep on it, pantless, on the bed.

            Will looks down at his lap, now, in real time, and notices he’s got a raging hard-on in the memory of it. He looks up at the cross hung high over the pews, over the altar. He cups his crotch in his hand and massages it, noting Jesus’s lacerations, and thinking about sucking the blood out of them.

            The priest asks Will to leave around midnight.

*

            Well, you know. Thought turns to words after a while, and words turn to action if they’re spoken adamantly enough and without sarcasm.

            That’s the fear Will’s parents had for a while when Will became bigger and older and stronger than both of them. When he started speaking what was on his mind. What if he took action? What if those yellowed notes they found in the old copy of the Bible were true? He wrote things like this:

            AT MIDNIGHT WHEN THE POLICE ARRIVED  
            THE TWO HAD TO RUN INTO THE WESTERN

            MOON-DOWN AND THE BODIES STAYED IN  
            THE HOUSE, REDDENING THE DIRTY FLOOR

            AND THE CRIMINALS KISSED WITH THE  
            BODIES’ MISSING ORGANS IN THEIR MOUTH

            HA-HA-HA: AT NIGHT THE DESERT’S RIPE WITH  
            DIABOLICAL THINGS.

in Japanese ink.

Which, of course, was only fiction. Will insisted as the dreams became more feverish and intense that he had to record what was going on in his head. This was only the _id_ , mom. But she didn’t get it. Parents—they don’t get anything.

Especially not psychology. Because if they had, they wouldn’t have put him in the New Mexico Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Where he stayed, rotting, dreaming, and getting angrier, for eight long months.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yee-haw
> 
> i've been listening to a lot of nick cave. i'm trying to get more comfortable writing sex scenes. so here's an excuse to write porn around my favorite landscape: the southwest.


	2. Call of the West

            If Will thought his public school was full of irritants, the neuroatypical company within the walls, the ones that wail and scream and repeat themselves and ask Will _why why why_ over and over again, is something else entirely. Will doesn’t think he hates them, but he certainly prefers his own company. He gets it, for the most part. Shut in the library, bereft of a roommate, studiously quiet, playing mute when approached. But his anger is fostered and bottled up. The appeal of being alone, of being free, starts to build.

            He sees Hannibal in himself. He takes time in the mornings to brush his hair back. But he can never tame his mop of curls into the sleek and flat style that Hannibal wears. ( _Wears_ , not _wore_. Because Will is sure that he is not gone, and he is sure he will resurface in Will’s life, either by proxy or… otherwise.) He brushes his teeth a lot, to keep them strong for biting. He tries to eat the new foods in the institution and judge their taste logically, tries to harvest a sophisticated palette.

            Even scouts for a particularly fleshy boy to perform cannibalism on. But that never ends up surmounting. As Will’s psyche deteriorates, he hides behind a guise of normalcy and recovery from the abstract, dark, homosexual thoughts he once maintained in the house of God, and, more threateningly, his parents. Besides, he doesn’t want to choose subpar meat. He holds conversations with Hannibal in his head at night. Hannibal fork-feeding him the prime meat he chooses, holding his chin, _Good little boy, isn’t it delicious?_ Brushes his teeth harder and chooses a new victim that he can murder and remurder and remurder in a billion different ways using only his mind. It’s truly a talent, the violent imagination he’s got on him.

            The institution is pretty shitty at treatment, and pretty expensive.

            Only the latter factor convinces his parents to take him out of it. Will doesn’t feel treated. On the ride back home (home, such a strange word, so far away from the scrupulously clean and soulless make-up of the city institution) Will sits in the backseat, hearing distant, underwater discussion about his ‘condition.’ His ‘improvement.’ On the radio (a thing that’s had to replace the television since the boys in the institution insisted on ball games rather than police reports), a song comes on that Will registers as very significant.

            As they drive past the cacti that line the dirt road, the sundown desert-rose in color, plumes of dust being kicked up by their tires behind them, Will knits his eyebrows together and tries to make the voices of his nervous, birdlike parents disappear. Underneath their chanting, some strange-mouthed man wails weirdly and angrily about runaways and shooting motherfuckers full of lead.

            His mother turns the dial down.

            “Won’t you be happy to be back in your own bed?” she asks Will.

            “Uh-huh,” Will says, accustomed to grunts now. He never was very talkative. The excessively chatty do no good, anyway.

            “We’re sorry you missed so much school, but I hear they paired with the school system there…”

            “Yeah.”

            “…So hopefully you’re all caught up.”

            “Okay.”

            “You don’t have to go back tomorrow, though. You can take a little break. Take tomorrow off. Treat yourself to some relaxation. Won’t that be nice?”

            “Yeah, mom. It’ll be nice.”

            Will presses his forehead to the window and watches the outside world, barren, a yawning, low-reaching sky showcasing how far he can go off, how empty the world is away from the fake make-up of society. They don’t _have_ to follow this trail back to the little shitty town where people pick on him. They don’t _have_ to go back to school, where his lessons in physics and algebra II distract from the things he’s _really_ interested in that they don’t offer. Not with their fifteen teachers in total. Psychology, criminal justice, sexual education—all moot in Mosswater, New Mexico. Most of this comes from Will’s psychosexual fixation on one legendary man who’s become a haunt.

            He wonders how he’s doing. Like an old friend. As they drive further and further away from the lack of civilization, Will thinks of going out there. Clenches a hand over his malnourished leg and imagines a bigger one, capable of murder, in its place. Closes his eyes and tries to force the thought away.

            In isolationism, you never have to worry about popping boners in front of your parents.

*

            When he gets home, he runs into the bathroom with its claw-footed tub, ringed with dirt, its floral, peeling wallpaper, its mothball smell, its old, shuddering vent, and grabs his cock over the toilet. Pulls it out of his pants, the ones he was wearing eight months ago, when he was forced into the institution. His dick is small, and he squeezes his eyes shut as he jerks himself off, tongue bitten between his teeth, working his hand over the flesh, searing hot. What kind of angsty teenager is he? Jerking off instead of yelling at the top of his lungs, instead of losing his mind because he was forcefully hospitalized by his parents. He’s forgiven them (in word only, don’t get him wrong), run off to the home he dreamed so often of burning down, and works his dick.

            He realizes now why, exactly, he’s so excited. Hannibal, for the majority of Will’s _life_ , was indicted. As soon as he was out, Will gets institutionalized. They’re on the same playing field now. They’re both smart enough to have escaped. (Even if Will’s escape wasn’t as… heroic.) They’re in the same space. _What a fanatic I’ve become_ , Will thinks with a fleeting moment of self-consciousness, chagrin making his cheeks pinken, but that fades as quick as it comes. He reaches back and plays with his own balls a bit, eyes squeezing shut.

_He’s gonna get his hands on me_ , he thinks, trying to recall his voice from the interviews. _He’s gonna put me on all fours and rub against me and puts his hands on me. Lovely creature that I am. He’s gonna tell me how beautiful I am, how I’m a desert flower that needs to be unfurled and played with._

            The thought of Hannibal looking at his hole and playing with the pink, furled spot, that ice cold viciousness melting as he sinks himself into him makes Will shiver, stroking his cock from root to tip, toes curling in his shoes. Stretching him with his cock, Will fitting perfectly around him, a neat sleeve for him to use. Will doesn’t make a noise as he leaves a messy stain on the toilet’s rim, quickly cleaned with toilet paper. He tucks his sticky, softening cock into his underwear and washes his hands. Feels very content, and refreshed, and energized in a way he hasn’t felt since he was eschewed from this house.

            Soon his absconding will be voluntary.

*

            By seven AM the next day, Will’s in a gas station forty miles west of Mosswater, buying chorizo and cheese and sleeves of saltines and a canteen of water, shoved in a knapsack that’s thrown over his shoulders. He had woken up with a throbbing headache and had to puke in the toilet. He’s never had anything to drink so he’s never been hungover, but if this is what it is like, he shares an empathetic thought for the alcoholics of the world. The sickness was wrought not from any poison, but a complete refusal of the body to spend another minute in the cyclical normalcy, separate from his loved one. He is tired of dreams, of the home and of his school. Today is his birthday, and the fifteen-year-old Will is determined never to return to the hot slab of Mosswater.

            There is a life to be made as an outlaw. He wants to be a character in the dime store cowboy books he collects, not its reader. There are people destined and content with mediocracy. And there are people like him—like Hannibal—destined to be written about.

            He unrolls a wad of cash for the cashier and thinks about buying a pack of Chinese cigarettes. But it’s all too early to get into _that_ kind of nasty shit. He’s gonna be a killer. Not a smoker. Besides, there’s something intensely erotic about the thought of Hannibal placing a cigarette in his mouth and lighting the end for him, letting him suck in the smoke. Maintaining eye contact between the silvery cloud of nicotine.

            And at the thrift shop next door, he buys a police scanner, and a revolver.

*

            New Mexico isn’t a big state, not nearly as expansive as some sort of hellish no man’s land like Texas, where the few municipalities intersect the long stretches of nothingness in between Houston and Dallas and Austin. But it’s not the easiest path to travel by. Will is on foot for a lot of it, soaking his shirt with sweat, his bones visible through both his skin and the cotton. He’s an underfed, pallid boy, his suntan lost from his months in the institution. A walking corpse, people tend to pull over when he juts his thumb out, fearful of his health. His youth is also an attractor, both due to his doe-eyed, sullen beauty, and concern as to why such a small kid is out here playing runaway.

            One man smiles while he drives him into the pitch-black night, lit only by the overhead moon and neon cacti that advertise motels with the sickly, fluorescent green. He tells Will that this is the perfect time to be out here on the road. A kid’s gotta go places, see things. Will sleepily watches the cross swing on the rearview mirror, his eyes blurring with exhaustion as they drive. His breathing is slow and calculated and the cross becomes hypnotic in its back-and-forth swaying.

            Soon he drifts.

            It’s a dreamless sleep and a short one. When he wakes up, he has a prickling paranoia that comes from location-based disorientation. The air that rattles through the vents in the car make him shiver, pinprick goosebumps raising on his flesh. Awkward, shy Will feels a surge of anger that has no logical root. Irritable, uncomfortable, head throbbing, eyelids seeming too heavy for his worn out, oversensitive eyeballs, and the bottled-up emotions of the last eight months seem to come out all at once. He’s trembling, watching the man and his unending, placid smile; his leathery, tan face; his thin lips; the roll of trembling, pink flesh beneath his chin. As vulnerable and annoying as a newborn.

            There’s really no reason that would hold up in court as to why Will brandishes his revolver from his knapsack, loads it and cocks his wrist to throw the cylinder into place, and empty the lead into the driver’s head. But he feels justified, exhilarated, all the same. The blood cakes the driver’s side window and Will can’t hear the tires screech from the sudden blow. With surprisingly steadied hands, Will stills the steering wheel and pulls the car to a stop after climbing over the divider and sitting on his victim’s lap. It’s still warm.

            He’s had two driving lessons prior to this. He can figure it out.

            Will unloads the body onto the packed dirt outside. It makes a sickening crunch as it hits the ground. He sits there for a while until the ringing in his ears subsides, parked by the side of the empty road. The time on the analog clock announces that it’s only just past midnight. The digital numbers blink for a while. His heart thrums in his chest and he catches his breath, staring out at the horizon that vanishes somewhere out there. One of his skinny legs sways out the driver’s side door. After he gulps down dry, hot air, he starts the car engine again by turning the keys, his foot planted on the brakes. It rumbles to life.

            See? Not so hard.

            Pulling his leg back in, he buckles up, and goes on his, down some arbitrarily numbered route, going 5 miles under the speed limit, a pleasant Sunday driver.

            He can’t wait to jerk off tonight to the thought of Hannibal praising him, and the brain matter he splattered on the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "okay cool where's hannibal tho"
> 
> he's fuckin coming and then he'll be fuckin CUMMING u know what i mean lol
> 
> thanks for the kind feedback, i'd mouthfuck each and every one of you!


	3. Some Wholly Wretched Baptismal Candidate

            The worst thing you can do to a kid on the road is take his boots. Will learns this pretty quickly. His money and his food run out faster than he anticipated and it’s late April the day he wakes up in a canvas tent that he’s sharing with a couple of piss-drenched no names and finds both them and his boots gone. Somehow, they neglected to take his trusty revolver. It sits shining in the knapsack. Will sits up, his head throbbing, and checks the chamber, huffs at the lack of bullets.

            He pushes the canvas flaps open and goes into the late morning sunlight, a blinding, searing, hot sky and barren land of nothing spread out before him. His feet are calloused and worn, but standing straight on the ground, baking under the sun, even the dead skin caking the flats of his feet isn’t enough to keep them from burning. He jumps from foot to foot with a hiss through his teeth and goes back inside the tent.

            What kind of fucked up man steals a kid’s boots? But then, Will is hardly a kid anymore.

            In the past few months, bar fights and working for food has become a life for him, and while Will isn’t a huge fan of this fruitless search for a serial killer that may not even be in the country anymore, he can’t help but attune all of his issues to his own doing. This chosen impoverishment is all his own doing. Still, he’s a bit proud of it. The capability of survival in his own self-chosen destitution seems noble, somehow.

            But he’d really like his fucking boots back.

            He’s been tricked a lot. The car was stolen early on. He worked and worked only to be given nothing, not even a can of beans. But when he gets his gun out—something he pretends he doesn’t like having to do—people tend to start acting right.

            Cops are after him, he knows it. It’s a wonder he hasn’t been caught for anything by now. But drunken bar fights and dead hobos doesn’t often interest the police the way a high-end cannibal had so long ago. And that’s top priority. Will leaves a few bodies around, but none that didn’t deserve it. None that weren’t already involved in enough sketchy shit that they would have met the same fate just a little bit later.

            Will stands back outside on his bare feet and grits his teeth and decides it’s time to shove off after destroying whatever nerves he has down there.

            Normally, around this time, he’d take up a job to pay for some new boots but working usually requires shoes and all Will’s got is a gun. He spends the day in the canvas tent, the smell of urine and blood still in the dry, stuffy air. Damp sweat and the smell of musty linen hang there like a fog, and he sleeps in it uncomfortable and with intermittent awakenings that make him kick off his blanket and whine like a sick animal.

            Eventually nightfall comes and he can step outside without his feet burning too much, though the ground has trapped warmth and it isn’t the most pleasant sensation. He carries his almost empty knapsack over his shoulder as he slogs through the heavy heat. The gun is in his hand, and he wears a grim glower. His hair is long, now, and soaked with sweat that dampens and trickles down his neck in a way that incites goosebumps on his flesh.

            Eventually, though, he makes it to a bar.

            It’s there, like a mirage, lit up on the ozone dark countryside, the WONDERLAND TAVERN, the name outlined with flamingo pink neon. Inside, Will is self-conscious about his height and his sweat and his bare feet and his gun, but they let him in without word and he sinks into a dark booth with its sticky vinyl, and orders whiskey he knows he can’t pay for. Does it again and again and drinks himself sick and pissed off until he has the gumption to get up and slog through the cool dark of the tavern and level his gun at the first bartender closest and says, very drunk, “C’mon.”

            Even drunk, Will has learned to defend himself, so when he notes the slight movement to the left of his ear, he side-steps and lets the guy smash the bottle down on the bartop instead, and juts the barrel of the gun into his gut, swinging him with his fist. The smell of good tequila spreads in the air like a spray of perfume. The guy is taller than him, though, and he hits his throat instead of his cheek and Will listens to the gag which strikes him as very funny. He laughs and staggers back, shaking out his hand and turning back to the bartender.

            “C’mon,” he repeats, his mouth spreading in a grin. His teeth are yellowed with plaque now, a month and half isn’t too much damage but the pristine shine of his teeth from the institution are a memory. “I don’t wanna have to hurt anyone else. See, I lost my boots, some fucker stole ‘em, and I can’t really afford all the drinks I put down either, and I really don’t know what I want in life or why I’m doin’ this to myself, but I’m going on through. So just. C’mon.”

            He motions to the cash register and is given its contents.

            Happy as a morning dove, he pockets it in his knapsack and lazily salutes the clientele with his gun, before making his exit.

            _Yeah_ , he will later think in retrospect, _it was all too easy_.

            Whenever the bartender catches him by the ankle—after following him in silence for what Will perceives as hours—and directs his face into the dirt, Will is too beaten and disoriented to do anything but snarl and struggle. His revolver has gotten away from him and dirt particles crunch between his snarled teeth as it’s brought down on the back of his head. Being pistol whipped is really what does him in that night. Will’s got nothing in the end except a linen shirt and the last wrinkled pair of briefs on his ass.

            Poor kid can’t even find the gall to jerk off.

*

            When he finds him, Will’s turned on his side, caked in a heavy layer of light brown dirt. If Hannibal was less keen, he might have thought he was decaying already. There’s a large scabbed gash on the back of his head and he’s curled in on himself as if in protection. Bracelets of bruises line his forearms and a puddle of liquidated, reddish vomit lays next to him. Hannibal stares from beneath the fan of his hat, those feline eyes narrowed just above where his bandanna hides his guide. He unmounts his horse and walks over to the child, curled there like an embryo.

            As he kneels down, arms rested upon his thighs, and studies the boy, he sees the minute flickering of his eyelids in sleep, the slow, shallow breathing of his small, rodent-like chest beneath his thin shirt, and even dollops of sleep-sweat culminating on his forehead.

            The smell of alcohol and iron is most predominant, but beneath that, fear, desperation. He’s only a child, Hannibal realizes, but he’s not touched.

            As he hefts Will limp but light body into his arms and carries him over to his horse, he saddles him up and tries to awaken him with a few shakes. But he’s thoroughly unconscious. He finds his balance with a bit of effort, the both of them upon the horse, and sets Mischa off riding.

            Hannibal isn’t one for merciful tenderness, but he isn’t going to give up free meat.

*

            Little ranch house by a well does the trick well enough because no one’s found him for a year now. It’s short and hidden among normal neighbors, though they’re sparse and unsuspicious. Older ranch folk raising cattle or retiring where they were born, too poor for those haughty condominiums in Florida. Hannibal melds in with his horse and his newly-found humbleness when it comes to fashion and décor.

            You can never be too safe. It was a fault, once, his taste for the grandeur. Perhaps in some alternate universe he’d continue pursuing that when on the run. But he plans to stay out of the law’s reach in this one.

            The child isn’t awake yet, so Hannibal takes his time in the tin tub when washing him and shaving him. A pair of scissors and a straight razor has taken care of that disgusting mop of curls, leaving him a shaved head and a barren, infantile body. Plain soap has been dragged over his skin, revealing a strikingly pale pallor beneath all the grime, though his shoulders and nose are peeling with what looks like a fresh sunburn. Besides the head wound, the most startling of Will’s issues are his feet, these cracked, caked bottoms that are blistered and burst.

            As Hannibal continues to wash beneath his knees and over his calves, Will’s breathing changes. He shifts in the tepid water and a hand comes up to slap at his own face, as if scratching for a bug. A stray hair has fallen down from where he cut it and is now tickling his nose. His sore muscles relax in the soap-milky water and he sinks into it until the petal pink skin of his eyelashes flicker and open.

            They meet eyes when Hannibal has the bar of lemony soap under his heel.

            “Hello,” he greets casually, washing away the dark stains of dirt.

            “Hi. …Hi, Hannibal,” Will says, his eyes blinking with sleepy and unsurprised recognition.

            When he says his name, Hannibal’s scrubbing stops and he puts the bar of soap aside, washing the grimy, lathered bubbles away. He looks over his body and then settles on Will’s youthful but somehow exhausted face.

            “Oh, what a shame,” Hannibal says, mouth downturned as his infamy precedes him, “I didn’t know I’d have to drown you so early.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter name from blood meridian :^)
> 
> comment ur lovely thoughts/criticisms or perish


	4. Honey

            Will’s wail sounds like a feline screech, a horrible noise of protest that gurgles in his throat. Stupid to scream when he’s being thrust underwater by the back of his neck. He swallows gulps of dirt-darkened, warm liquid, and chokes for a moment, air bubbles crawling up the sides of his cheeks from where he futilely yells. The screaming produces nothing but noiseless soundwaves that travel underwater syrupy-slow.

            As he struggles beneath the soap-scum covered surface, Hannibal keeps his mouth set, his eyes downcast, as unimpressed with this show of struggle as he would if strangling a chicken. His eyes drift, though, and that is Hannibal’s mistake. As he stares at Will’s long, tan back, roughly shoved over, he counts the bumps of his spine, sinewy and stretched under his tan skin, dotted with dark moles. The icy, stiff vice-grip that Hannibal maintains on the boy’s neck softens only a modicum but it’s enough for Will to use what panicky strength he can muster to sit back and break away from his hold, grabbing the straight razor from the edge of the tub and brandishing it.

            He stands up, backing out of the steel tub and standing with his back to the wall, pointing the razor at him. He’s cornered himself but it’s just out of Hannibal’s reach, the tub separating them. “Knock it off _right now_ , or I’m gonna be _really_ pissed off.”

             Hannibal looks him over, resting his hands in the bath water, significantly lower, since Will’s thrashing has caused half of it to splatter to the floor and wet Hannibal’s clothes. “I’m admittedly impressed by your willpower. And equally surprised that my reputation is known by someone as young as you.”

            Casual conversation, now, as if Will isn’t recovering from attempted murder, naked and shaved and holding a razor. His breathing is ragged and panicky, and the air of the bathroom is too humid and thick, the warmth from the bath intermingled with the landscape’s unwavering sunlight making him feel trapped and choked. As if being crushed beneath weight. His nudity doesn’t help, adding a level of vulnerability to this hellish situation. This is _not_ how Will pictured things going when he met his idol, his dream-lover.

            Will tries to think of what to say. _Let me go?_ Of course that wouldn’t happen. Hannibal is on the run and Will just proved previously-possessed knowledge of him. Identification by a stranger, especially one that now has DNA of the famous cannibal on him, would be a death sentence.

            _Keep me?_ And become a meal?

            He tries the desperate compromising tactic he’s seen all too often in movies. Hannibal never lets his victims go unscathed.

            “I’m on your side, Hannibal,” Will insists, tucking the razor’s flat end to his palm and lowering it in a show of potential compromise, “I know all about you, I—I’m not a rat, I’m not gonna tell anyone about you.  Don’t even know how you _found_ me. I’ve been on the run for—look. I’m just like you. I’m a killer, too, I swear it. You can look in the papers! Will Graham, I’m a runaway, and I just got out of a mental institution. I’m being pursued for murdering some guy whose car I later stole the day I ran away from home. But I killed more. The cops don’t know. We’re birds of a feather, Hannibal, and I’ve been having a hard fucking time trying to get around. I’ve always idolized you, and I thought I could do what you did. I don’t know if that helps, but I—”

            “Enough.” Although Hannibal has a fondness for his ego being stroked, as any killer does, this frantic exposition makes his head hurt. He sits back on his wooden chair and spreads his leg, patting one of his thighs. Will glances at his hand and then to his face with a nervous flicker of his eyes. His thumb strokes the cool flat of the blade and he steps through the rapidly-cooling puddles of water on the floor to Hannibal. But he doesn’t sit down.

            “I know who you are,” Hannibal says. Of course he would. He carefully follows the news, the tabloids, that talk about him. Everyone always wants to hear the things people say about them that they do not say to their faces. But more importantly, he needs to track what the papers know about him. If the public knows where he is, the police knew a week ago. And in those same papers, Will Graham is always tucked away in the back pages, a less sensational story compared to a serial cannibal at large. The pictures of him in the paper are monochromatic yearbook pictures from his early days of high school. He is unsmiling, lily white, and in glasses. He has a slouch and dark, striking features on such a sallow face. Dark mop of hair, dark eyebrows, dark, sad eyes. Now he seems wild, less fragile, and much smaller than the pictures portrayed. He’s sunbaked and the new shaved head and the scarred flesh and malnourished body makes Will seem much more vulnerable and unprivileged than those middle-class pictures did. “You are an unsuitable imitation, and I was never a fan of copycats.”

            “I’m not a copycat!” he insists, “I’m not! No one thinks that body is yours, I don’t eat bodies, I—I’m not trying to be you or pass myself off as you. Please, Hannibal, I’m only a—”

            “A fan? A pathetic child, desperate to be a part of a world that you find exciting only through the industry of entertainment? A filter of glamour has convinced you that you’re immortal and untouchable, has it?”

            “No! I don’t even watch movies like that, I don’t even watch movies. Your stories, I kept them all—I read your papers, your interviews, I recorded them all.”

            Hannibal grabs Will from around the waist, pulling him onto his lap. Will gasps and his razor falls from his grip as he’s swept from the wet tiles, uncomfortably sat upon the killer’s lap. One of those large, capable hands that pinned Will down by the back of the neck now creeps menacingly to the front of his throat. Right before Hannibal can fasten those deft, calloused fingers around him, he puts on his best imitation of Hannibal, as he’d seen in an interview so long ago.

            “’But there is capability in me for love, though not romantic. For I’ve been without my sister for years, and there is still sentiment in my heart for her, though it may be tainted by the poison of nostalgia.’”

            Hannibal doesn’t soften, but stares at him with a lip curled in disgust.

            “If you’re capable of love,” Will says, still panicky, pulling a leg up to rest on Hannibal’s thigh, toes curling in the fabric of his pants, “You should give me some mercy. I’m only a child and a strong admirer of you. I don’t want to run off, I just—”

            “Don’t compare yourself to her.”

            “I wasn’t. I just know you’re not some evil, mindless monster. I know you have your reasons. I know you have your predilections in choosing your kills, too. And I know I’m not prime. You just found me after I got beat up, right? I’m not a reward. I’m a hand out. That’s not your own work. It’s lazy theft. Hannibal, I adore you. No!” he puts his hands on Hannibal’s cheeks, “I _worship_ you.”

            He dimly realizes that he’s managed to make eye contact, upsetting his usual conventions.

*

            “Comfortable?”

            “Not really.”

            “Good,” says Hannibal, securing his wrists with the old bandanna, stained with sweat and dirt, its pure white cotton now a dingy dishrag color. He wonders how old it is, wonders if it predates his own birth. Will watches his own arms be secured to the bedpost and breathes calm and studious. He doesn’t seem concerned with his own entanglement, for this lack of control is a bit of a relinquishment after that long span of time when he was choosing what to do with life, entirely of his own volition. There’s something so relaxing about giving up all choices and becoming a slave to the whims of those who are stronger, more powerful, more intelligent than you.

            Even though, instinctually, Will should be terrified, he’s conditioned not only by society but by his own ridiculous fantasies to think of how warm and nestled he is on the bed. It’s a simple room, a whirring, slow fan above the adobe flooring, the walls painted a peeling desert red and the bed post made of old mahogany, topped with quilts that are patterned with tales of cowboys. Outside, the window that is half-drawn by white lace curtains showcase the far span of nothingness outside, ensuring that they are isolated. There is terror and intrigue in this prospect. Beside the bed, there is a television perched on wooden legs, and Will supposes that this will be his source of entertainment until the inevitable killing.

            Hannibal stands up, his weight delivered from the mattress an unwelcome loss. “Hey, so…” Will says, his big, tired eyes staring up at Hannibal, “Where are you going? What are you gonna do with me?”

            “I suppose it’s best for me to get to know you first,” he says, walking over to the television and running a finger over the top of it, collecting dust. He flicks it away in Will’s direction, the puff of lint making him sneeze. “After all, while it is good to know your meat by touch and smell, it is ultimately more useful to retain what you know from memory.”

            In school, Will read “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a hunter used his guests as animals, isolated on an island for him to chase with his gun, a more exhilarating hunt, for he was no longer satiated by leopards and monkeys. Will wonders if this is going to be like that.

            He wets his dry bottom lip with his tongue and implores, “Do you insist on touching and smelling me?”

            A brave move on his part. Hannibal does not look unfettered. “I suppose I’ll have to eventually.”

            Will shows his teeth. “Can’t _wait_.”

            Hannibal sits back down and crosses a leg over the other in a very feminine and European way. Will noted this in the interviews about a year ago but since then, he’s hardly paid attention to it in his dreams. It’s jarring, now, to see a man like him with such a bloody reputation and such a powerful grip look so delicate.

            “So you are a homosexual.”

            “Yes,” Will says easily, squirming for a moment and testing the grip of the bandannas. Easy to get out of, and he wonders why Hannibal chose something so weak and unresisting. Maybe the attempted runaway will be even sweeter for Hannibal. Maybe he’s giving him the chance of running for his own entertainment in the subsequent chase. But it seems irrational and unsafe. But then, psychopaths like Hannibal never seem to doubt their own ability, do they? “Or a faggot, if you like.”

            “Hm. Do you like being called that?”

            “Who would?”

            “A strange array of boys that like humiliation might.”

            “Do you know this from experience?” he hisses, jealousy blooming in his words. As if he has any right to talk to a stranger this way, solely because he’s entertained fantasies of their closeness.

            Hannibal does not respond. He stares at Will with the affectless gaze of a reptile and tilts his head back.

            “No,” Hannibal says after a long time, “I don’t have a particular affinity for insults, and I have never been with someone who has.”

            Suddenly, Will thinks back to the interviews, wracking his mind for any indication of Hannibal’s affection to anyone other than the altruistic predilections he maintains for his sister. Nothing. Will’s heart begins to race as he thinks about the fact that, worse than Hannibal being in love with someone else, Hannibal may never, ever like him to any degree.

            Because Hannibal has never liked _anyone_.

            Will doesn’t say anything after that. He lets his body rest, his back on the quilts, his arms bound above his head, and he faces the blank green face of the television. In the mirror of the screen, he watches himself with a mixture of confusion and disgust, like seeing the mugshot of someone only slightly familiar.

            “Would you like it on?”

            “Yes, please,” Will says.

            When Hannibal grabs the remote to turn on the television, he lets his free hand drift over the tan slant of his thigh. Will’s leg jolts at the touch, since he is so exposed and so naked, and his teeth slant in a funny little grin. Hannibal lets the TV glow on Will’s face and then leaves the room without ceremony. He locks the door behind him.

*

            It takes a long ride by horse to get there but Hannibal is nothing if not a patient man. The market is nice, overrun these days by organic-pushing lesbians and healthy couples, but these sunburnt hikers don’t recognize him. What used to be genuine farmers are replaced by the lower middle class’s people, that pick through the fresh fruit and vegetables curiously, wondering what dish to make for their loved ones. They wear tank tops that showcase pale shoulders and red forearms, tucked into cargo shorts. Hannibal likes it here, though. Likes picking through the glowing orbs of fresh grapes and collecting cuts of meat.

            While Hannibal hasn’t been in New Mexico long, all outdoor markets are like this now. He walks about, picking out tomatoes and spices for sauces, and thinks about the markets from his youth. Barefooted children, not unlike the one that’s in his home, selling olives and tugging on a young college-aged Hannibal’s suit lapels, insisting he purchase their hand-picked foods. Kids with nets of caught oysters, grinning and cracking them open and feeding them to Hannibal raw.

            There is no fish here, he notes with a pang of disappointment, and he buys a carton of whipping cream and coffee beans from a vendor. He deposits all these things on his horse’s saddle.

            He makes his way to a plaza and sits at a shaded cabana table facing the large fountain. On the platform encasing the water, two boys chase each other, their jeans rolled up. They kick chlorinated water at each other, and stand in it fully at one point, the flats of wished-upon coins sticking to their feet. Hannibal watches with the bored and nonplussed stare of a tired birdwatcher. But he is intrigued by their increasing viciousness. One of them eventually ends up pinning the blondish one down with his knees, sitting on his chest and holding his head under. It reminds him of his own morning. When their frazzled mother puts an end to this faux-murder, she smacks the dark haired one and coddles the blond. But although one is punished and one is the punisher, they both share a look of knowingness that exists only between them. Hannibal watches as they disappear to their car, both of them unremarkable in appearance, but notably striking due to their viciousness, and their willingness to be brutalized all for the name of fun.

            He pops a fresh olive into his mouth and crushes it beneath his teeth. It seeps bitter flavor like an aphrodisiac. He tilts his head back and stares at the evening redness above, a high, endless sky, protective and warm. Inhaling the smell of heat—coppery and thick like a sauna—Hannibal recalls the fountain scene in his head: specific images paired with Will’s morning bath.

            An arm twisted, clinging to a neck. The surfacing of panicked bubbles. Heavy breathing of the punishing: _say uncle, say uncle_! Some woman speaking Spanish in a dull, judgmental tone to his right. Will’s white hand creeping deftly along the tin tub, grabbing the razor Hannibal had stupidly left aside. The boy resurfacing with a pink-faced, fearful gasp. Will coming up furious and determined, somehow smart despite the lack of air. The brain working separate of the body’s limitations. The boys must be the same age as Will, unless Will is very small, and far stupider in the way they talk and play. Unexperienced in life.

            Hannibal goes back to the market and buys tequila for Will. He could smell the alcohol on him, under all the urine and all the sweat and all the desperation. He wants to reward the stupid boy for being so charmingly, mindlessly devoted.

            He rides back in the dark with all his goods. The house is aglow from one room inside. So small and claustrophobic, plopped upon the nowhere of the landscape like some safe-place.

            When he returns, hefting his buys to the icebox, sweaty and unimpressed with the slowness of the day, he listens to the sound of televised screaming in the other room. Otherwise, all is quiet. Some telephone pole buzzes quietly. These silent nights of Hannibal’s are so strange when interrupted.

            Unscrewing the lid from a jar of honey, he drags his knife over it and slathers it onto a slice of his newly bought loaf of bread and walks to Will’s room.

            He leans in the doorway.

            Will is twisted in a curious way, laying on his side with his neck craned to watch the TV screen, his arms still locked at the wrist and held above his head. His legs are splayed apart and his chest rises and falls with the slow, exhausted sleepiness of young cowboys. There’s a slasher film on the television, and a young man with a bowl cut and flared pants repeatedly bashes an ax into the head of a cellar-trapped demon-girl. Will’s eyes do not part from their amazed stare of the screen until a commercial disperses it. _Movie fright night will be right back after these short messages_.

            “You brought me food?” he asks, but Hannibal hardly hears this. Because underneath all the scent of normalcy that this situation exudes—save for the tied-up murder victim part—there is a more prominent underlying smell of salty sexuality. It’s too familiar to be mistaken.

            He looks between Will’s legs at the dollop of precum balancing on the head of his flushed, red cock. It’s hard and straining, but not very big. In fact, it seems below average for his size. Hannibal can’t help but find this strikingly attractive.

            “Yes,” he says, and Will looks down between his legs as well. If the lights were on, or the TV a natural color, it would show the flush creeping along under his ruddy tan. His mind has been occupied all day with the reality of the situation. “The movie’s good.”

            It’s an odd excuse. _Evil Dead_ death scenes are hardly arousing material.

            “Yes, isn’t it a _pleasure_ what kind of worlds fiction can take us?” Hannibal sits at the foot of the bed, holding the piece of bread in his hand.

            _You have no idea_ , Will thinks, recalling the unending falsities of disgusting, sticky sex, blood-splattered and bath-watered that have played in his head all day. The TV can barely compare to the kind of twisted glory he recalls, even NC-17 films like this can’t shock or disgust audiences as much as Will’s mind can. At least, that’s what he believes. Why else would they put him in a mental institution for his hyper-sexuality regarding the cannibalistic serial killer across him now?

            He opens his mouth, indicating how hungry he is.

            As Hannibal leans over to feed him the bread, a bead of honey slips down the side of it and lands on his dickhead, crawling down in tandem with the much more watery, tepid substance that’s tracing the hardness of his flesh, veiny and delicate.

            “ _Ohh_ —”

            The noise makes Hannibal’s teeth lock in his mouth.

            “Like an arthaus piece,” Hannibal observes of his cock, and tucks the piece of bread between his teeth. He swipes the piece of honey up with his thumb, making Will’s legs curl up to his chest and jerk as his stomach tightens with a gasp.

            “Hannibal!”

            “Hush,” he says, and continues feeding him the bread. Will’s cock spills precum and he strains forward. “What?” he asks when he notes Will’s chin is tilted up, like an animal seeking out a pleasant scent. Which is exactly what Will is doing.

            He wants to _smell_ him.

            The sweat that surrounds Hannibal’s neck is pungent with pheromones. Will’s head is practically heady with desire, swimming as though with fever.

            “What?” Hannibal repeats.

            “Let me—” he says, his mouth full, lip dribbling honey.

            “No.” Hannibal stands up, “That is a sufficient enough snack for you.”

            “I’m starving.”

            “I’ll prepare a much better meal in the morning.”

It’s unclear whether Will is going to be fed or be doing the feeding. Hannibal turns the TV off and casts Will into the cool darkness of the room, exuding only his own bodily heat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i ain't checkin this one for errors
> 
> enjoi!


	5. Circus Boy

            The early morning sky threatens them with murmured thunderclaps, electricity playing distantly along the horizon. It is finally beginning to cool off. In the home, though, Will’s body is prickled with the everlasting heat of ecstasy. His thighs, thin and tan, are parted in a V and speckled with shimmering sweat droplets.

            Hannibal isn’t up yet and Will is swamped with sweat. The intermittent sleep of always-changing dreams and nightmares has made him toss and turn. He’s long since removed the bandanna from about his wrists and thrown the quilts over himself when the brimming rainstorm teased a chilly draft into the cracked slit of the window. But he’ll sit up, every other hour, either shivering or sweating, and if he is warm, later, the sweat will cool on his body, making goosebumps rise. A natural, cyclical fever. He supposes with the months-long exposure to the flatlands, the thrill of encountering his beloved, and the alcohol intake and poor diet are all taking their toll.

            As the light outside creeps slow into the room, casting everything in a dull but seeable glow, he supposes it’s time to investigate. He isn’t getting any sleep and the waiting of wonderment is a torturous ache, his legs twinging with the need to get _up_ , to _move_. Throwing them over the side of the bed, he winces at the creaking of the floorboards beneath his inconsiderable weight. As he takes another step, carefully, some higher power looking over him makes the clouds expel their moisture, and rain begins to patter the walls and the roof, with heavy, slapping reverberations. Will closes the window when he notices the rain beginning to dampen the rug. Even now, he still maintains the manners instilled in him by his mother.

            Walking to the small cabinet in the room, he retrieves a pair of old denim pants that he has to roll up at the ankle and a flannel shirt. For some reason, despite his nudeness in front of Hannibal, exploring the home _naked_ seems far too dangerous. _As if a sturdy layer of cotton will protect me_ , he thinks, fixing the buttons with nervous, trembling fingers.

            Going through the hall, he notes the walls are covered with strange, outlandish reprints of fine art, painted with religious and mythological tales of antiquity. Edvard Munch is the only painter he recognizes. Will stares at a painting of a weeping, corpselike wraith of the Madonna, sperm encircling her frame. The rest are beautiful but unnamable, and nothing like the abstract, clean-lined, bright-splattered art that’s so popular in these times. While he’s head Hannibal speak of God in the television interviews, he’s never thought if the man is particularly religious. Perhaps Hannibal deigns himself God. God: impenetrable by outside sources of Earth, capable and unknowable, and wrathful.

            Maybe he is.

            He continues on. Past closed doors that he dares not open, ear straining for the telltale breathing of a so-lovely serial killer. Of his valentine.

            He continues, the rain covering his movements like a friendly soldier, but when he finds a door that is cracked, darkness emitting from beyond the threshold, he cannot help but push it open. An aromatic cloud of artificial lemon drifts from the room, making his eyes water. The room is a clean, steel-floored place with white, _white_ walls that make Will squint. There is a metal table, similar to an operating or autopsy table, with a box of parchment paper beneath it. On the bleached wall, knives of various sizes and a meat hammer are lined up. A bucket beside a bag of lye sits neatly by a large refrigerator. Even to the eye that is unfamiliar with Hannibal’s crimes, it’s clear what this room is used for. It’s a butcher shop.

            Because he is a child and because he is stupid and because he is obsessed, Will walks tentatively to the fridge. The scent of cleaning supplies makes his eyes burn with its acidity, but even beneath that heavy, medicinal perfume, the iron of blood sits pungent and recognizable.

            He jerks the door open.

            Inside, there is some cruel Eden of bodies strewn about. For some reason, the freshness of them is striking to him. He’s only ever seen bodies either newly shot or blackened by the sun, bones polished and bleached. There are dismembered limbs, each of them set apart from one another, skin removed, cut into handsome flanks, some bones removed, some not. Disjointed. Items. Never-people. Meat. Some cuts are wrapped in the brown parchment paper. Marbled with fat, they could pass for steaks. But the intestines (floating in a jar like preserved snakes in vinegar, sealed with a lid), the eyeballs (so recognizably human, as yellowed as egg yolks), give away their fleshy origins.

            He steps back as bile rises in his throat, a strange headache beaming through his temples, the prickle of tears stinging his eyes. The _Evil Dead_ movie made bodies look so cartoonish and grotesque. Will is strangely ashamed to see bodies as they are—and even more so to see them as food. The fever sweat begins its cycle of cooling down yet again, and he turns on his heel only to see the broad, flat chest of Hannibal Lecter, standing behind him, silent as a sniper.

            “How rude,” he observes with a bored, affectless stare, maroon eyes scanning over Will’s sick little body.

            “Hannibal! I’m not going to tell anyone!” Will insists, his voice cracking with pubescent timing.

            His lips thin. Then he says, conversationally, as if he isn’t brandishing a knife in his right, gloved hand: “It is not like I was particularly _anxious_ of my hobby being discovered by you.”

            “Exactly!”

            “So there is no reason to kill you simply for seeing what you already believed to be true.”

            Will puts his hands on his chest and curls his fists in the cloth. “You. _Totally._ Get me.”

            “And so I will have to kill you for nothing other than disrespecting my privacy, and my trust.”

            Will’s grip loosens and his eyes widen in desperation. He’s hyper-aware of them as they well with tears from both fear and the chemical-laden air. He can too easily imagine them plucked from his head, squeezed out like nothing, and placed in a jar beside the snaking, browning intestines probably used as a parody of tripe in menudo. Squeezing his eyes shut seems like a good way to protect them, and a fat tear trickles down his cheek, and plops off his chin, splattering on the tiles.

            “Don’t hurt me, please,” he repeats in a broken and trembling whisper. But he suddenly comes to the striking realization that there’s really no reason for Hannibal _not_ to kill him. He hasn’t charmed him, hasn’t told him anything about himself. There’s nothing about him that is remotely interesting to this man who kills the boring—all he can do is beg for his life and insist he’s on his side. There’s no personality to him, nothing entertaining worth preserving. At least, not in Hannibal’s eyes.

            Will envisions the other victims now, desperate to be saved, so aware of the long span of their lives they’ve led that mean nothing to this brain set on killing them, this brain that cannot register autonomy besides his own. All of the victims so aware of all the things about themselves soon to disappear at the hands of one man, and tragically incapable of expressing any of it. Even if they could, would Hannibal care about their pasts, their motivations, what they can give him in the future? There is a disconnect between what Will feels for Hannibal (and for life) and what he is presenting to Hannibal. What can Hannibal say of him? _He is brave to fight me back, and nimble with his hands, and weirdly horny. That is all._

            Don’t we all serve God? And if we don’t, we become useless.

            Will doesn’t know why he decides to do it, but in a last-ditch effort to present himself as—he doesn’t know—not prime for slaughter, he sticks his fever hot, red tongue out and drags the flat of it wetly over Hannibal’s lips and up his nose, his hands coming up to frame his cheeks in his palms. It trails between his eyebrows, and he stands on his tippy-toes to reach his hairline, but he is just not tall enough.

            Hannibal blinks, his nostrils flaring. There is a shimmering line of spit on his face that winks in the daylight break outside, and he feels silly and halfway humiliated, and mostly confused. “Why, are you an idiot?” he demands, removing a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbing at his face. “A damned fool?”

            Humor in his voice and the edge of hysterics, Will talks at the speed of light now: “I’m sorry, I am an idiot! A bonafide, well-bred, number one idiot! I am—one kept in a carnival showcase, presented to the bystanders as the silly little fool. A circus clown, made to have peanuts thrown at me, made to be shamed by the normal and upright members of society. Why do you think I was tossed aside? I became too smart, less of a drooling child. It made for no entertainment. No king wants a jester that’s smarter than him! The masses despised me! So, I was trashed. This lick was only a part of my act. It really made people the opposite of horny. There’s something so inherently disgusting about an improper kiss, especially in a crowd of onlookers. People will pay to be disgusted. People love stories about horrible sex, right? I just wanted to provide my learn _ed_ -usefulness to you.”

            A long stretch of silence where the bizarreness of this statement sits and stinks in the air with the antiseptic.

            Then Hannibal’s red lips quirk in a smile. And then they part, showcasing his saber-toothed grin, and then he’s laughing, a weird, wheezing sound, his eyes scrunched and his eyebrows hitched slightly. He’s not an expressive laugher, barely emitting noise at all, but his shoulders shake and his teeth, showcased in that lopsided grin, make Will feel both relief and fear. It’s both horrifying and anticipatory when you make someone that doesn’t like you laugh. You can never tell the preposition that comes with said laughter: at or with?

            Hannibal retrieves a cut of meat from the fridge, hefting it in his palm, the paper crinkling, as if laughing too. “Come, little jester, let’s have breakfast.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took longer than usual! had a bit of a hard time figuring out where to take this and a little lack of motivation
> 
> i'm making this up as i go


	6. A Warm Place

            Will isn’t quite sure why Hannibal started sleeping beside him, but he can make an educated guess. To maximize security is always a good rule of thumb for any prolific serial kidnapper. Will finds it horrifying and comforting at once. On one hand, it’s dreamlike and extraordinarily unreal to have a dream—an obsessive fantasy, really—culminate in such a warm place. But he is wracked with horror at the televised memories of Hannibal’s deeds. Bitten-off ears of the violinist flash in his mind when Hannibal’s sleeping mouth brushes against the side of Will’s head. When he drifts and thinks of church, of angels, he imagines the dead couple placed in the facsimile of a _Primavera_ painting. Hannibal was probably only a few years older than him then. Names that mean nothing to him—images that mean everything. Will trembles when Hannibal’s big hand comes around and holds onto his elbow. He reckons he’ll be joining the list of known victims. Will has a copy of the _Tattler_ magazine tucked into a drawer at home. Carson Nahn, Beverly Katz, Matteo Deogracias, Roman Fell. Sixty-something others, he supposes. Will wonders when he’ll be slapped there like an afterthought, his full name listed between a couple and a snack.

            There is a finger that traces Will’s hipbones in the morning. This delicate, strong hand, glistening with a sleepy sheen of sweat, makes Will chub up in his trousers. This is the same horrific hand that ripped out tongues and put X’s on the faces of the devoutly religious. The same maddened, disturbed hand that made a Glasgow smile with a twisted wrist and a piece of luminescent and homicidal glass. It traces over Will’s cock, throbbing and warm, and does not decide to rip out his organs. Will’s skin crawls in tandem with its exhilaration.

            His arm will wrap around his waist in his sleep and he’ll think of the tendons pulled tight as he bludgeons a man to death in order to cannibalize his cheeks. Will can almost feel his ribs collapse in on themselves, snapped like chicken bones inside his weak flesh casing.

            Then there is Hannibal’s mouth. He’s a quiet man, and Will has found himself speaking less as well. They share a tense, dangerous silence, like a rabbit and a fox during an intermittent truce. When Hannibal’s lips graze his cheeks, he remembers the story of Abel Gideon, apparently force-fed his own limbs before death. These soft lips against his skin—it’d be so easy to part them and dig those sharp, animalistic teeth into his flesh, tear it off. But he guesses Hannibal likes his food cooked.

            On hot days, the sun will fall in through the window and heat the body of Will, sprawled there on the floor, reading a book. That square of light will make him heat as if with fever and he’ll stay there, basking like a cat, until Hannibal comes in from doing whatever it is he does all day. He’ll splay a large hand on the small of Will’s back, slowly healing from its sun-blistered state, and he’ll wipe up a trickle of sweat with his thumb. He’ll place the thumb upon his red tongue and make a noise of affirmation.

            Like checking marinade.

            Will never questions this ritual. He has a strange feeling that if he ever acknowledges it, it’ll bring about its ultimate conclusion faster. And as much as he knows it’s inevitable, and as much as he dreads it, the strange hormonal lust of obsession makes his life with Hannibal equal parts rotten and blooming.

            Every action has an underlying message—every body part of Hannibal’s has a secondary past. Will is stuck in the throes of both sex and death in balanced measure.

            But nothing has yet happened in either degree of sex or violence. The threat lingers there like a stink in the air, like the looming presence of a bad neighbor, like a storm cloud. But there is nothing more than fleeting touches and hateful glances. There’s nothing more than unconsciousness embraces and Hannibal’s sideways glances as he uses a knife on some anonymous piece of meat.

            It’s Friday—Will knows because the TV announces another horror midnight showing as FRIDAY FRIGHT NIGHT—and it’s almost two in the morning. Will has awoken and feels Hannibal’s hot, large body behind like, emanating fire and potential, a sleeping cougar. Will’s back is swathed in sweat. It’s almost summer now, and the slowly whirring ceiling fan barely makes a draft in the room.

            “Hannibal,” Will says quietly. Hannibal’s eyes slant open, red as the dark flesh of a cherry in the dark. “I can’t sleep.”

            “I can’t either,” Hannibal admits and sits up on a locked elbow.

            “I have to go to the bathroom.”

            “Then I’ll join you.”

            So they go down the hall together, Hannibal in his pajama pants, Will in his underwear. It’s too hot for anything else. Will’s skin is alight with arousal, and he stands in front of the toilet, and pisses into it with a blush crawling up his neck. The sound of it, quiet like stream water, is infinitely embarrassing to him when Hannibal is standing there by the sink, watching him with those unblinking maroon eyes, scratching at his high white cheekbone with his hand.

            Will tucks himself back into his underwear and flushes the toilet and says, “It’s so fuckin’ hot.”

            “I know,” Hannibal agrees, his voice laced with sleep and that unidentifiable, messy accent. Dripping like honey and violin music, sticky on Will’s neck, that voice of his.

            “Can we go outside?”

            “Yes.”

            In the plum-dark desert of nighttime, Will felt he may as well be on Mars. Nothing to see but the flat, hard-packed dirt of the ground, the world spanning horizonless forever and ever around them. On the moon, lost in space, on an asteroid, the only one watching over them the stars. They could do anything here, bereft of society’s rules.

            This must be what Hannibal feels like all the time, since he sees himself as a God. No witnesses, no judgment, no masters. Will lets the cool breeze hit his face, a deliverance from the stuffy, unbreathable stale air of the home. His eyes flutter shut.

            As he mulls over this isolation, Hannibal, his energy intangible but present, like a security camera, walks right behind him. Will braces himself for a blow to the head, his eyes squeezing shut tight, his lips pale and pained as he digs his teeth into them.

            But he is not met with violence. Hannibal’s lips crawl over the back of his skinny neck, and his hot tongue creeps out to lick up into his hairline. Will inhales, smells Hannibal’s own sweat. Pungent and pleasant as a sour flower. He’s silent as he’s tasted and then lets out a whimper or an exhale—some sort of expulsion of air—as he’s tossed onto the ground on his hands and knees. Overhead, the sky threatens a thunderstorm and the smell of electricity and rain and the wildness of Hannibal’s heat makes Will’s head swim. It smells like ozone, and his virginity.

            Hannibal, a metasurgeon of evil, presses his cock up against Will’s ass. Will feels like an animal again, hands in the dirt, fearful and trembling and turned on. His body is shivering and feverish and his skin blooms pink, and he’s grateful for the blanket of night that drapes over this show of schoolboy chagrin. Through the thin layers of their clothes, Hannibal’s cock is hefty and thick, a warm, searing organ that throbs with a heartbeat, and Will’s hole clenches and unclenches in anticipation, as if there’s a possibility at all of copulation between the layers of clothing.

            His breath huffs between Will’s prominent shoulderblades, and he humps him, rocking back and forth, both their bodies moving. Will’s cock beads with precum and his boyish thighs part. He feels dirty and playful, as if he’s just been dared to do something, as if he’s just watched porn for the first time. There is no seriousness to this and he feels himself smiling as he’s humped against, as he’s fondled and groped.

            The sky emits a thunderclap and the first rainfall of that summer begins, hot droplets splashing on their skin. Hannibal’s hand works itself into Will’s mop of hair, finally growing back now, and he humps him hard and brutal, with mechanical, rough thrusts. Will is arched, pulled taut, his arms strained as he’s jerked back like a bow, and he opens his mouth and lets a raindrop hit his dry bottom lip. Lighting intermittently plays and exposes their coupling in fleeting, strobing spotlights, but no one is watching.

            Balls full and sensitive and flushed as Hannibal’s slippery cockhead stabs behind them, Will lets out a weak cry of his name, and says, delirious, “You smell nice.”

            It’s a strange compliment, but Hannibal concedes to this statement by grabbing Will through his small cotton underwear and groping at his flush, full cock messily, blindly, jerking him off with strange, non-surgical measures. Will’s heart is pounding and his chest feels tight and his arms strain, holding himself up on the dirt that’s now becoming mud, his cock drooling now with dewy precum.

            Will emits a squeaky, weak noise, and cums, staining the front of his pants with wet, hot semen that Hannibal fondles. It makes Will blush, feeling his own cum pressed into his sensitive cock, his body twitching with aftershocks, Hannibal’s hand smearing his spunk onto him. _Self-lubricating_ , Will thinks for no reason at all, and he wheezes out a satisfied, airy laugh of exhaustion. His toes uncurl after some time but Hannibal keeps on groping at his penis through his underwear.

            Will lets him, and if Hannibal cums, he can’t tell, for his stuttering hips and humping and groans do not stop all that night. He’s turned onto his back and is jerked off to fullness. After some twenty or thirty minutes of this mad, adolescent dry jerking against one another, Hannibal gets rid of both their clothes. They’re swamped with rainfall and sweat and Hannibal pushes Will’s arms up, ducks his face beneath them, and inhales slowly, his thick cock riding the curve of his inner thigh.

            When the lighting flashes again, Will catches sight in that blue-white glow of Hannibal’s cock. It’s huge—much bigger than his, and he feels shy and exhilarated at once. Hannibal is much bigger than him, Will realizes while being choked by both the rainy air and the pheromones or something else Hannibal is producing in pure heat and smell alone. So much bigger—he could break or fuck him easily. Will imagines it now, as their cocks slide together, both of them slick and hot and so close. His cock would make an outline in Will’s little body.

            He throws an arm over his eyes and comes to this thought with a cry. Then his body goes lax against the ground. He feels like he’s run. His hair is plastered to his scalp and forehead, his body is weak, and his bones feel heated and molten now. But Hannibal continues rocking against him, his balls sliding up Will’s shaft.

            When he finally comes, Will is half asleep, eyes half-mast and mouth parted in exhaustion. Spit bubbles on his bottom lip and he lets out a keening whine when Hannibal’s cum splatters his stomach in searing, pearly droplets.

            Like an animal marking its mate.

            Will can’t help but whine, and then laugh, and then moan when Hannibal repositions them and takes him again between the thighs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry mom


	7. Disease

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for very mildly dubious consent. poor kid just has a gag reflex.

            It was inevitable that he’d get sick. His immune system, basking so long in the unprotected and diseased outback of outlaws and stagnant pools of limited water, has finally given in. Fucking in the rain certainly wasn’t any help. Gasping under Hannibal’s hot body, rainwater peppering his tongue in his open mouth, coughing through the swamp-thick air—he basically _inhaled_ the world around him. He wakes up miserable, peeling his eyes apart, caked in a layer of rheum, and he moans in the harsh sunlight that slants over his face like a flashlight in a punishing interrogation. Will pulls the blanket over his face, opens his mouth and winces when his throat is too swollen to swallow.

            Weakly, he whines for Hannibal. His voice comes out in a whisper. When there’s no answer, he tries again, and his hand flies to his throat to soothe the ache that blooms there with his hot palm. He’s had worse than this before. But there’s something childish growing in him. The innate need to be taken care of. His eyes crease shut and he tries not to think of being a kid under the warm arm of a parent. He’ll feel shame crawl into his very _pores_ if he compares that innocent boy of his past to the sexed criminal he’s become.

            Sitting up, he pads miserably throughout the house, looking for Hannibal. Supposes he’s out, because he is alone, and he makes himself tea and shivers as a wave of chills spider-legs down his back, his arms, though his face is burning. The teabag bleeds amber into the hot water and he studies the steam crawling from the cup, lets it drift over his face.

            Stares at the teacup. Feels a weird, sinking feeling in his chest at the sight of the delicate porcelain. A sort of nostalgia for something he can’t quite place. Something dark and cold and Venetian-red.

            He misses Hannibal terribly—though it can’t be anymore than ten hours, thirteen at most, since he’s last seen him.

             When he finishes the tea, feeling very bad for himself and the state of his health, paying no mind to the trail of bodies he’s left behind and the pain he’s caused, blissful in his youth and his sociopathy and dedication to an ideal, bereft of feelings for others, he sits on the couch and stares out the window. It’s miserable to be sick in the heat. Will feels like he’s in an incubator. He fans himself with some strange, decorative hand-fan that he’s found on the fireplace mantel. When he hears the front door, he springs to his feet despite his lack of energy and locks his arms around Hannibal’s waist.

            Hannibal lifts his arms, as though ready to perform close quarters combat on the assaulter. Then his hands settle on the small of Will’s sweat-damp back.

            “My goodness, you’re eager.”

            “I’m sick,” Will announces through a gurgling voice.

            “I see,” he places the back of his hand to his forehead, feels the emanating heat. “What are your symptoms?”

            Will describes them through a sore throat, wincing when he swallows his own spit, his eyes squeezing shut. “No one in the _world_ has felt as bad as I do!” he decides, rather childishly, and blushes beneath his fever when Hannibal doesn’t seem to find this immaturity amusing.

            Hannibal lifts him off his feet and takes him to bed. Will finds pleasure in this unexpected tenderness, and he pillows his cheek against his shoulder. Hannibal scares him still, very much, but he lets his hands rest against his capable arms and he closes his eyes.

            Set on the mattress again, Will cozies himself down into the blankets again, comforted with Hannibal by his side, and he extends his arms for an embrace that Hannibal (tentatively) accepts. Somewhere in the landscape of a hazy, romantic, unrealistic mind he registers that he is well confined to this room and bed and he has been for a bit now. Long enough that his hair is growing back. Long enough that his scars are healing. Long enough that he can hug the broad chest of a serial killer he’s only previously dreamed about.

            There is no consequence in this heaven-hell of fulfillment. He realizes this as he opens his mouth wide, showcasing his white teeth and letting his tongue slip out, shiny and pink. Hannibal looks down at him with half-mast eyes and seals their mouths in a horrible, hungry kiss. Even though Will is very sick, they both know that Hannibal is somehow immune to it. As Will scrabbles his palms at Hannibal’s shirt and yanks at it, his tan legs locking around his waist, his nails crawling up his spine, Will thinks about killing everyone in the world but Hannibal. Thinks about Hannibal walking through a courtyard of gore, staining silver spurs with blood deep and rich as cake, caring nothing of the bodies save for what meat they can give the living, and being proud of him.

            Although he isn’t sure now that the world around him is logical, as he had before in the routine of home and school and societal norms, the thought of no consequence, of heady, mirage-like insanity and violence makes him infinitely hard. He juts his hips up against Hannibal’s stomach as they kiss and he coughs in Hannibal’s mouth. His cock leaks precum through the thin cloth of his underwear, spreading through the cotton until his flush cockhead is visible but clouded by the underwear.

            Hannibal is pretty familiar with Will’s nudity at this point but he still feels exposed when Hannibal yanks the underwear down his slim thighs, runs his palms up them to heft his hips up, bird-like and angular.

            Will watches, head full of lead and ears full of cotton, like a passive participant. His cock is small and he isn’t embarrassed of it when it rubs against Hannibal’s stubbly jaw before he takes it in his mouth. Talk about trust. A cannibal with your cock tucked in his mouth.

            The feeling occurs to him a bit after he registers the sight of it. There is warmth and Hannibal’s red lips, so pretty sealed around them, feel even better, a tight suction, and Will smiles, a fucked-up, cocky smile, his long arms stretched above his head as Hannibal slobbers on his prick. He puts a leg over his shoulder and lets Hannibal work him over with a deft, slippery tongue, crawling up the underside of his penis.

            Will lifts his body up in a jerk when Hannibal pops off him and spits on his dick.

            Shivering in fever, legs locked around Hannibal’s neck, staring at the ceiling, Will pictures a world with Hannibal as his doctor. Imagines it with psychedelic delirium. A cold hospital bed, a green sky outside, antiseptic walls, a gloved Hannibal touching his burning face. Shoving something down his throat, plastic-gloved hands cupping his face. Blood on the sheets. A thrown rabbit stuffed-animal. He trembles.

            “What are you thinking about?” Hannibal peers up at him, his nose buried in the junction of his thigh and crotch, tongue resting there.

            “I’m thinking about you,” he manages in a worn squeak, his hand flying to his throat to hold it. Cradling the pain from the outside. An artificial display of self-care.

            “I can see your eyes moving beneath your eyelids. You have quite the imagination,” he murmurs, a low, rumbly sound. Will closes his eyes and nods. All he’s ever able to picture are fantasies of what is attainable but not the present physical. Hannibal has lived in his interiority as a God for so long. Hannibal shows up in so many versions in Will’s mapped brain. This is religion. Will wonders if even this is real, and decides it is. He gasps, his ribcage pulling at the skin of his chest as he arches back. Hannibal has dragged his mouth between his ass cheeks and now works his hole with his tongue.

            “There are…” he wheezes between his sore throat and the lavish attention Hannibal is delivering upon his person, “So many versions of you I see myself with. Always have. They’re so real.”

            Hannibal doesn’t reply, just licks him out, Will’s face red at the warmth in a place where he’s never been touched before. A sick virgin, writhing on the bed, Hannibal’s hands locked around his knees.

            “Always end up with you.”

            Hannibal pops off of him and crawls above him. “That’s obsession.”

            He gropes at his own cock through his pants and unzips. Will’s eyes open and he sits up, staring at him. “Oh, shit.”

            His cock falls out, huge and red, curved with a large vein trailing the underside of it. When he places it against Will’s thigh, the sensation of its girth weighing down against his delicate skin makes Will’s mouth fall open. Rubbing off on his thigh could be enough for the both of them, and he sort of hope Hannibal does that instead.

            But he presses the head of it between his cheeks. Will isn’t prepared for this. He just wanted someone to get him soup. Some tea.

            Closing his knees together, he peers up past his legs.

            “This is… a strange way to take care of me,” he observes, trepidation coloring his face. Hannibal is big—and Will doesn’t expect to be able to take him without a few tears leaking their way down his face, at the least. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, watches him through quickly-moistening eyes. His bleary vision turns Hannibal into a two-faced mirage.

            “We need to increase your body temperature to break the fever,” he says simply, “Exerting yourself will cause pyrogens to bind to receptors in the hypothalamus.”

            “Aren’t you supposed to _break_ a fever?” Will snarls, his cock softening. Hannibal sees this and smiles.

            “No. Don’t be scared, Will. I will open you up.”

            “Hannibal…”

            But Hannibal shoots him an icy stare that detracts from all possible protest. Will bites his flush red lips and lets his head fall back, his eyes sealing closed.

            When Hannibal begins to breach his hole without any preparation, Will flinches and kicks his chest. “Stop.”

            Hannibal does. “Would you like me to use my fingers first?”

            “ _Yes_ ,” Will says, as if it’s a stupid, obvious question.

            Hannibal readjusts himself so he is laying between Will’s legs. Will’s face is blooming with embarrassment at the position—it seems so medicinal, like he’s getting an exam. When Hannibal’s spit-slick, bony finger begins to prod at his asshole, he feels this way even more.

            Not wanting to think about this probing, sterile view of a surgeon Hannibal looking through him for a disease or something, he decides to focus on something else. He sits up on his elbows and watches Hannibal’s face with hazy, glazed-over eyes. Hannibal’s mouth.

            Usually clad in a bandanna, blurry in police footage, he watches it now. Strangely pouty, always red. His tongue sits on his bottom lip when he opens his mouth. Inside, he has a full, crowded mouth of sharp teeth, that reflect the excruciating sunlight like the open maw of a shark. It’s one of the most beautiful things about Hannibal, Will thinks, has always thought. The deft lies, the creative explanations of murder that spill from between those blood-red lips makes Hannibal look vampiric. Ready to feed. Will feels the blood start filling his dick again. Hannibal’s eyes flicker down to watch as his cock stiffens, and those lips quirk into an amused, dangerous smile at the phenomenon.

            “Feeling better?”

            “Do you have anything besides spit?”

            Hannibal retrieves lubricant from the drawer beside him. Slathers it over his hole, his fingers, his cock. The sound of Hannibal’s foreskin moving, and the suction of his palm against his own dick make both Hannibal and Will inhale sharply. Will’s dick is fucking _soaked_. And the lube hasn’t even touched his dick yet.

            Will is rocked against Hannibal’s finger, then two fingers, then three. The tight muscle is stretched around his hand, and he feels his face burning from both fever and shame and overstimulation. Hannibal turns his wrist, curls his finger, catches something in him that makes him curl his toes and toss his head back.

            “Haah… _Shit_.”

            Then, his hand is pulled out of him without ceremony. Will cries out and whines, fists the sheets in his hands. “On your knees,” Hannibal demands.

            Crawling over as he’s told, Will finds this position more comforting. Avoiding his face, being exposed fully as only an orifice for the fulfillment of a decadent man, makes him feel less of a person. He can strip from his identity, his (rapidly decaying) sense of morality and righteousness. He’s only a hole for Hannibal. A hole that’s being breached, his hips being grabbed, his body being worked around the large intrusion that makes Will gasp and cling around him.

            “This little body,” Hannibal observes, his chest pressing to Will’s slick back. He feels so huge inside him, pushing his body around his cock, his legs shaking from the intrusion. Hannibal runs a hand over Will’s stomach, feels where he juts out slightly in his skin. “Beautiful.”

            Will sobs out in response, his throat stinging. But he doesn’t notice this, not with Hannibal’s cock battering inside him. It hurts. It undeniably is excruciating in a way he never anticipated. But he feels claimed. Hannibal stole his virginity. Hannibal carried him here and made him his. He’s a prisoner of this room now, a prisoner of Hannibal’s mental illness, slowly proving contagious. If the association of sex and infection weren’t so grotesque in Will’s mind, he’d say that this transference of body into body is another representation of further ownership—Hannibal’s diseased him.

            “I’m yours,” Will observes, drooling onto the pillowcase, his eyes trained on the wall, being pushed back and forth under Hannibal’s strong thrusts. He grabs his own cock in his hand, feeling like a doll. “I’m your item, your protégé, your hole. I want to be yours forever. I want you to mark me.”

            “Like a dog,” Hannibal says, his voice heady, syrupy, dripping down his back like sweat or spit.

            “Yes, _yes_ ,” Will cries out, spilling his cum on the bed. It catches even him by surprise—he cries out and watches himself orgasm. Makes a white puddle in the sheets, his hand barely moving as he watches the cum drip down his hands. His little cock twitches, flushed and pink.

            If Hannibal notices, he doesn’t say anything. He works silently, greedy hands roaming his skin, huffing in control, gripping Will’s little waist. Will squeezes around him, whimpers like a stuck animal, turns his face so his cheek presses to the pillow and sniffs up some mucus.

            Hannibal leans down and whispers in his ear, “Gera maža kekše.”

            He pulls out without cumming, and Will only manages a puplike noise of confusion before he’s turned around onto his back, and Hannibal straddles his chest. Will whines but lets his mouth fall open, to say, _Hannibal, no_ , but he doesn’t manage to.

            Hannibal fills his mouth and Will gags immediately. Even if his throat wasn’t swollen, he knows he’s gag. Will whines in pain, his eyes filling with those earlier-predicted tears, and Hannibal groans at the hot sheathe of his throat around his cock.

            “Mine, my boy,” he whispers, pressing a thumb to Will’s stretched mouth, rubbing the side of his own cock that plunges into it like a toy. Those words are almost enough to make up for the pain blooming in his throat. He closes his eyes and sobs brokenly, his cheeks streaked with tears.

            Hannibal pulls out and cums on his face.

            The hot white dollops hit his nose, his cheek, but mostly his open, red lips. Will looks used, flushed, naked as a baby bird. A hand fits itself in his curled hair. Salty tears mix with the cum and streak through it.

            Hannibal’s big cock slides against his cheek as he softens, panting but still looking composed. Will feels debauched. Pornographic. Hannibal, however, looks like sculpted, erotic art.

            “That hurt,” Will points out, cupping his throat.

            “I’m sorry,” Hannibal seems genuine when he says it. He settles down on the bed beside him and begins to clean his face off with the sheets. Will sniffles boyishly and tucks his head into Hannibal’s neck. He fits an arm around him, beneath his strong arms, clutching his warm waist.

            “I’m sorry, my boy,” he repeats into his hair and watches over him as Will slips into a fever dream-laden sleep. When he awakens, Will’s voice is gone.


	8. Red Sun

             When Hannibal comes home the house is dark and cool and smells of soap. The windows are clouded with condensation from a misty night—or very early morning, really. From one of the rooms, the playful chatter of a cartoon sings down the hallway. _Quick, Speedy! He's right on our tail!_ There, on a polished wooden chair, sitting cross-legged, is Will, his hair damp. He wears nothing but a big, old Hanes shirt and underwear Hannibal had picked up at the convenience store a few weeks back for his houseguest. His skin shines neon in the light of the fluorescent cartoon. He looks zombie-like, sallow, in the light of the television. It’s mid-summer now, and even nighttime is far too hot for Will to go out. He’s been suffering from heat headaches, vision spotty, mind swimming with violence. He’s also suffering from the long stretch of boredom that comes with the endlessness of sitting alone in the house. He almost misses his high-stress days as an outlaw, a runaway. But he knows that as soon as he'd return to his life of crime, he'd long for these baby-dream comfort days of nothing, nothing, nothing but Hannibal and what Hannibal would bring him. This house is as silent and peaceful as a womb. Still, like birth, there is the fearful premonition of exit. Being thrust into the real world. Is there anything more traumatic than birth?

             “You're back late,” Will accuses, his newfound penchant for dramatics coming from too much time in front of the TV, and the desperation for conflict that is birthed from boredom.

             “I had a bit of an adventure tonight,” Hannibal's voice is soft-spoken, reverential. His head is tilted back and his eyes scan the ceiling mindlessly. As if he is looking through a dream that exists somewhere right above his head. Like the thought bubbles in the cartoons that Will is watching. Will frowns and plucks at a scab on his leg, thick brows low-set over his scrutinizing eyes.

             “What kind of adventure.” It's less of a question, more of a seething demand.

             Tucked in Hannibal’s hand is a brown-wrapped slab of meat. He unwraps it and shows it to Will. Shiny and red and darkening the paper is a disturbingly fresh butcher’s cut of—steak. Will’s mouth fills with spit at the sight, and he follows Hannibal to the kitchen to watch him cook it, and sits at the counter, his arms crossed beneath his chin, eyes focused on the sprays of juice that pop out of the frying pan like oily rainfall. Hannibal winds a story about hunting in the safari on foot while he cooks, about how he’s managed to take down a lion after stalking its movements for six days straight. He weaves a sense of the primordial throughout his words— _savage, heavy-footed, maw, prowl_. _Raw_. Will could never imagine Hannibal like a caveman, though. Everything he does is speckled with grace.

             Will knows that the meat isn’t cow, nor lion. His own body feels vulnerable, exposed. He can feel the inside of his stomach turn. Wonders what sounds it’d make in Hannibal’s hands.

             Knows that soon, he’ll be in that pan. Nothing more than a single meal. His consciousness stripped, only to sit in Hannibal’s belly. He feels his cheeks, his eyes, heat with tears. But if he stays complacent, interesting, does not pose a threat, maybe he won’t present himself as worthy prey.

             Hannibal smooths his hair back after they eat and he asks him why he’s crying. But he doesn’t sound like he cares.

*

             “Please don’t touch me.”

             Blood-hot hand sliding down his side. “I won’t.”

             The absence of warmth. The sheets are still cold. The mattress lifts.

             “No—wait.” Guilt sliding like a pill in his chest.

             “Yes?”

             “Let me…”

             Silence for a moment. The sound of cicadas crooning outside.

             “Let me touch you.”

             “I don’t think I want you to.”

             “Hannibal…”

             Silence again. In the dark, he can’t tell where Hannibal is.

             “I yearn for you all day. But then you’re here, and you scare me.”

             “I don’t think I deserve that just because of your media-fueled predilections and your presumptuous dreams.”

             “I know.” _You just fed me human meat_.

             “How do you feel?”

             “Full.”

             Then, a hand slaps to his chest. Ice cold and sudden and Will gasps, his heart jumping under his skin, like he’s just been electrocuted or seized by a stranger.

             “One day I’ll rip this open and pry your heart out of you.”

             Will’s hands fly to grasp at his forearm, nails making divots in his skin.

             “A valentine,” Will says, eschewing paranoia from his voice. He fears presenting weakness.

             Soft exhale of air. The hand retreats. He feels something fall onto his face lightly, like cloth, or a feather. It’s scentless but cloying. A bandanna, maybe.

             “Not everything you _think_ is correct.”

             “But how would _I_ know? You can’t—can’t prove to me otherwise.”

             “Solipsistic, aren’t you? No. You don’t know what is really going on. Only your eyes are reliable.”

             “They’re gone now,” he mumbles, referring to the cloth, the lightless night, the broken lamp.

             “That’s right. What do you feel now?”

             Feather-light touch, creeping up his face. He grins, nose twitching like a rabbit’s. “You’re tickling me!”

             Hannibal removes the roach from the cloth. “…That’s incorrect.”

*

             Hannibal begins a practice of getting Will to trust him. Will’s been finnicky, weepy, angry. Maybe it’s cabin fever. Maybe he’s basking in his fears, remembering his own research and finally realizing that the hands that touch him have removed life before. That Will’s wild obsession with him has made Will remove life too.

            Will’s mouth is red-hot from kissing and he turns his face away from Hannibal’s ministrations, his sharp-toothed mouth, his heart pounding in his throat. Wild, huge eyes stare at the floor.

            “You’re going to eat me,” he laughs a breathless, joyless laugh, and squints one eye up like an animal. He kicks at the bed, feeling restless, nervous, fiery. Hannibal tries to get him to be still. But Will flails in his grip like an untamed creature, eyes feral and nervous, pupils blown and enveloping his irises like onyx marbles.

            “Stop it, Will.”

            “If you’re going to kill me, kill me!” Will finally yells, face prickled with sweat, exuberantly hot. New Mexico packed-ground hot. Earth-core hot. He feels like he’s burning, shaking. When he looks at Hannibal’s face, so calm and placid as the surface of a pond, he feels a new hatred prickle at his skin. _You look at me like I’m so useless, so ugly, so volatile. But you’re not human. You hate me. You are laughing at my fears. You are using me as a toy. And I’ve done this to myself. I was a fool for thinking I was different! For thinking I was more than another victim! No one is. We—all of us in love with a murderer—want to think we are the exception._

            Will sits up. Mops at his face with the low thread count sheets, crisp and stiff, wets them as if with piss. Hannibal stares, stares, faceless in his serenity. A wall. “You are going to eat me. I’m not different than any other victim. And I thought we were partne—!”

            His voice is cut off when Hannibal shoves his fingers in his mouth, hits the back of his throat, makes him gag unexpectedly on those long, white fingers. He coughs loudly and his eyes water, his chest heaving. Finally realigns himself, breathes through his nose, and lets Hannibal speak cold into his ear, his strong leg thrown over Will’s, pinning him down: “You will learn how to be a human among cattle. But first you must stop acting like such a cow.”

            Will bites his fingers and snarls. Give his height and youth, it’s not a particularly threatening gesture. Unless you’re fearful of the age-old horror trope of evil, possessed children. Hannibal slips his hand out from his mouth and squeezes his jaw so hard that Will swears he can hear his own jawbone creak horribly. He whimpers and kicks at the bed again with one last, weak kick.

            By the time he’s tantrumed himself out, his fever’s hit 103 degrees.

            Hannibal wonders how a delirious mind can be trained.

*

            Late August rolls around and Hannibal leads a new victim through the dark. The night is cloyingly black, the kind of dark where you can’t see your hand in front of your face, and as thick as water. Hannibal holds the whimpering man by the waist. He’s slender, tall, and he trembles as he walks. He’s very stupid and inclined to answering nondescript ads in the back of local newspapers offering a private meal and a show. Desperate and brain-fried, the man picks at his nails, hunches, asks in a nervous, excited voice every so often where they’re going.

            “Home,” he says, smiling, looking at the deep cut of the man’s cheekbone.

            Randall looks up from behind the fan of his eyelashes and makes out the faint outline of Hannibal’s face, illuminated by the slight moonlight peeking out through the thick clouds. That silver outline of man is so nameless, so indescribable. A kind stranger. Just some image, some silhouette, promising primal pleasures.

            Randall is an animal and so he must be fed and mated with.

            Hannibal seeks to be rid of animals. This has been his mission for a while.

            When they arrive at the house, he turns on the light. The expanse of it is empty. There is no breath of life. As hollow as an abandoned tree. But neat. Like a showroom, or a preserved historical monument that has been maintained for viewing pleasure. Ghosts live here.

            “Take a seat,” Hannibal purrs, as charming as ever, his face turned away from Randall still as he makes a haste exit to the kitchen. Randall sits at an old ranch table, thumbs at the polished wood, smooth and glossy. His eyes drift around the antiseptic home, smelling of iron and coffee grounds, of tin and summer. A fan whirs soft overhead. He feels uncomfortable and extraordinarily anticipatory at the same time. Like a first-time prostitute. _This is how the secrecy of things always feels_ , he thinks, his eyes sleepily roaming around the dining room. _You are ashamed of yourself. Because you are doing things society doesn’t like. But you have to do it like this. If you weren’t to, it’d upset society._

            Even so, he doesn’t feel a shred of danger.

            Hannibal returns. Now Randall gets a good look at his face. Interestingly mask-like. He seems like he wears a face over his face. But kind. He stares and watches him set down a plate of food. Food Randall doesn’t know the name of. Some sort of tender meat sits in the middle of the plate, liberally doused in some sort of sauce, peppered with sesame seeds, with strips of what he thinks are green onions. It pulls apart tender. He recognizes it as something similar to pork belly.

            Hannibal eats politely, gently. He eats like the sound of a silver bell. Like an autumn leaf falling upon the face of water. Randall admires his poise. His eyes crease in pleasure. “Pork?” he guesses, when he’s swallowed his mouthful.

            Hannibal straightens his posture a bit, preens like a proud dove, and lets his wine-red lips curl into a smile. “Veal.”

*

            Secure in their isolation, Randall spreads out on the sheets luxuriously, his eyes slanted with pleasure, rolled back as he’s fucked rhythmically in bed. Hannibal has strong, powerful thrusts that pierce him, that shake him, that hit his prostate and make him kick and howl and curl his toes, make him feel rawed like an animal, make him feel as though he’s being _bred_. He arches his neck back, grits his teeth, swallows noisily, his eyes teary.

            Hannibal however, is silent. He watches him like a fox after prey, his breaths inaudible. Nothing but the creak of the bed under his weight that is thrusting in, in, in, working his prostate, his back arched above him, gives an indication of his presence. Hannibal is like a well-oiled machine. And although his cock is aching and red and fully thrust into his hole, his sheath spreading that hole, filling it with warmth and throbbing, aching pulsations, Hannibal doesn’t even seem turned on. It makes Randall falter in his non-stop moans for a moment, but then he stops thinking about what a human thinks of him, and goes back to lavishing in this pleasure, disregarding social norms.

            Vision bleary, he thinks he’s hallucinating for a second when he spots a smaller, white hand on Hannibal’s muscled shoulder, and he blinks rapidly, his mouth dry. Then, he goes silent and seizes up tight with horror, body winding cold and taut. Hannibal gives a sharp inhale from between his teeth at the sudden grip around his cock.

            Will rests his chin on Hannibal’s shoulder and loops his arms around his neck, smiling down at Randall with pleasure. The boy looks sick, both physically and mentally. There are dark rings beneath his eyes, his face is colored with the kind of red sheen only the ill and the fucked get. His hair is sweaty and clings to his forehead in wet swaths.

            “What a pretty cock sleeve,” he muses. Randall hears from his horribly youthful voice a tinge of a western accent. He freezes up in shock, but Hannibal continues to fuck him. Will watches with the calm revelry of a mother with her newborn. Will’s hand rests on the back of Hannibal’s neck, massaging it. “If you fill his guts with cum, I’d really like that. I’d like to see him full and used.”

            Now Hannibal makes noise, grunting as he thrusts, his little friend leaning against him, watching hungrily. He speaks a line of filth so degrading that it makes Randall’s dick drool but his face go red, his heart pounding. He feels like a pinned hare beneath a wolf. He realizes that he’s clenching up a lot, dragging friction probably suctioning Hannibal’s cock almost painfully. But the slaps sound wetter.

            “Look at you. A little ragdoll, being fucked and filled for nothing but a stranger’s pleasure. You’re just a toy!” he says, bemused, and Hannibal’s lips quirk into a small smile before he continually humps against his ass.

            “What a filthy bitch. Useless. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that,” Will’s face is so innocent, his grin so teasing. Like a joking playground bully. It makes Randall’s stomach twist. “You’re good for something. Being a cumdump. I bet you like it. Like leaking out Hannibal’s cum. You’d do it proudly. Show it off, if you could.”

            Will slinks off the bed, crawls on all fours beside it, grins at Randall who stares at him speechless, fearful. Will watches him with those big, blown eyes. Randall wonders if he’s on some sort of drug. “Say it. Say you love it.”

            “Yes,” he says, as if in a trance, “I love it.”

            “Say you love being nothing but a useless whore. You have no purpose. You’re just a hole.” At this point, Hannibal growls and leans down to bite at his neck, rolling Randall’s white flesh between his sharp, crowded teeth.

            “I’m—I love—ah!” he cries out. Hannibal’s crept a dry thumb in beside his cock that is stuffing his hole. Randall’s eyes close.

            “Say it!” Will demands harshly.

            “I love being a whore…”

            “God, that’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. No one wants something like you. I bet people are ashamed of you. You little item. You fuck doll.”

            “Ah…”

            Will sits up on his knees now, beside the bed, almost as if he’s prepared to pray, and he arches his back, leans forward, and kisses this stranger’s lips softly. “You want to be our toy forever. You want to do nothing but stay in bed, lay here, and let Hannibal fill you with load after load,” he says against his mouth, “While I tongue fuck you.”

            After he says this, Will dips his tongue into his mouth, his voice strangely tight and cruel, his fingers curled against the sheets. Hannibal continues plowing him, but his thrusts are becoming erratic, his thumb slipping out. Randall keens like a cat, his legs spreading to give him more room. When Will pulls off, leaving both their mouths slicked with saliva, he laughs at the sight of his wantonness, his display of exposure.

            “You like your cunt being filled?” Will mocks, and pinches his cheek, grinning at him with all the mindless jeering of a jester.

            Hannibal groans, and Will looks from Randall to him, his face softening in adoration, and he says, almost reverentially, “He likes your cunt. But it doesn’t mean anything to him. You’re just something to fill.”

            Randall kicks.

            “You want to be filled?” Will’s hand comes around, and between them, and he grabs his cock, and begins to rub it. “You want to be stuffed full? You’re so lucky to have someone like Hannibal in you.”

            Through the dreamy pleasure, through the small hand working his cock with that fever red clutch, through the mind-crippling orgasm that’s wrought out of his body, through the recognition that Hannibal’s cock is so big that it stretches his stomach out in a disgusting bulge, Randall realizes that he recognizes his name.

            With a name so unique, it’s not hard to remember who he is. Black-and-white sensationalist headlines paint themselves across his brain. _Hannibal the Cannibal! Serial Killer Caught!_

            His eyes snap open and he sweats, pants, and says breathlessly—“You’re—”

            Hannibal cums in him them, fills him with that searing seed, and Will slashes his throat with a knife that’s tucked delicately against his palm. The little death.

*

            Eventually the location has to change. Hannibal and Will leave together, Will’s heart very much still pounding, and police unearth the house two months after their departure. The evidence of Hannibal’s presence is overwhelming. And the supporting evidence that runaway-turned-spree-killer Will Graham has been here is as well. The papers are divided. Some say Will was Hannibal’s meal. Some of them say that Hannibal made Will kill everyone and that the boy is innocent, despite the famous information that leads to prove Will’s obsession with Hannibal beforehand. It’s the unearthed diaries of Will’s erotic fantasies regarding this psychopath that lead to the most accepted—and accurate story—that patterns itself across national papers. That they’re now partners in crime. Something about Bonnie and Clyde. Something about rotten homosexuality.

            A cop named Jack Crawford assigned to the case assures the masses that they are indeed predictable. That they are hiding in plain sight. That they’re not stowing away in some hideaway anymore. And he’s right, the deft little sheriff that he is.

            Will can’t take the four walls anymore. That disease that plagued him inside the little house made him feverish, and irreversibly mad. Though it wasn’t a long trek to get that way at all. Hannibal luxuriates in Las Vegas, the Strip as gaudy and bright and open and enticing as Will was. A city made for adults.

            Sin City. He couldn’t keep lugging a kid around these parts.

            _Twenty-one and up only, please_.

            _Sorry, sir, you’ll have to bring your son elsewhere._

 _Hey, no kids, weirdo_.

            Hannibal was inclined to agree with them, really. Sitting at the bar at his hotel, painted turquoise bright, some handsome fellow playing the piano gracefully, potted plastic plants bleached white on either side of the marine-schemed bar, Hannibal looks out the window to the sunset. That red sun creeping down behind the casinos, the desert-themed motels, the billboards advertising Coca-Cola, the heatwaves making everything shimmer and blend and lose its definition. That red sun, like a fevered face, like blood, like raw meat, like a valentine. That red sun sure looks nice.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for following me for this wild ride! 
> 
> support me/make a request: ko-fi.com/bibles


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